17 saint francis magazine | fall 2023 IS OF THE ESSENCE Photography by Jeffrey Crane (BA ’97) By the spring of 2018 I’d been buying and selling vintage watches for five years; I found them beautiful and fascinating, though I’d never really had any plan—I was simply curious. What had become clear in that time was that there was a hole in the contemporary watch market, something missing. For those curious, what was missing was a three-register manual- wind integrated chronograph for under $2,000; for those who just went cross-eyed, it’s a type of watch that had once been common and reasonably priced for three decades, and now didn’t exist. That lack frustrated me, so I decided to do something about it. Plus, there was the fact that American watchmaking had, until the middle of the 20th century, been a huge industry, and had set global standards for accuracy. Many of those companies had Midwest roots—Elgin in Illinois, Ball in Ohio, Illinois in Wisconsin (I’m kidding—they were in Illinois, too). I have a larger-than-average chip on my shoulder about the Midwest, and I grew increasingly frustrated that this industrial legacy of ours had just vanished. Beyond that, in the years I’d been paying attention to watches, prices had skyrocketed—vintage watches had become a much bigger asset class. While there wasn’t anything necessarily bad about that, it frustrated me that prices were making it harder for young people to buy a quality watch. So, I started Haven, and we released our first watches in 2019, released the first tie-dyed chronograph ever as a limited edition in 2021, and then released another limited edition in 2022, this time a chronograph with the date at 9 (it’s a tiny detail, HIS FATHER’S PERSISTENCE IGNITED WESTON CUTTER’S INTEREST IN CLASSIC WATCHES AND PROMPTED THE FORMATION OF A SUCCESSFUL WATCH COMPANY. CUTTER ENCOURAGES UNIVERSITY OF SAINT FRANCIS STUDENTS TO TAP INTO THEIR CURIOSITY WHILE FORGING THEIR INDEPENDENT PATHS. but, in the world of watches, the location of a date on the dial is a Big Deal). We released two new models in the fall of 2022—a dive watch and a GMT—and we’ll be releasing another chronograph this year. All our watches retail for under $2,000, which is a lot of money, but in watches, it’s not much. There’ve been challenges and difficulties in starting a watch company while a full-time professor, husband and dad of three. That said, the fun Haven offers feels very similar to the fun of writing, or the fun some of us find in a classroom: the open-ended inquiry, of being able to follow one’s curiosity. More than anything, it’s monumentally satisfying to make the thing you feel like you can’t find; I don’t imagine the pleasure from that abates anytime soon.
